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play their game.
    “So one of us might be a rapist.”
    “Or one of our multiples,” Faust said.
    Hayden laughed bitterly. “That makes about a hundred and thirty-seven suspects. You want to include yetis, aliens, dinosaurs, robots, demons, dogs, or fallen angels, you gotta add another twenty-five or so.”
    Pace felt the need for contact again and touched Dr. Brandt’s wrist. It electrified him, put him back in his body. “Why have you thrown in with them?”
    “Alexander Kaltzas holds me accountable as well. For failing to keep his daughter safe in the hospital. For allowing you and Cassandra to have an association.”
    “So it’s not all paranoia? This man is really after us?”
    “Yes. I’ve met him before. And his...his agents visited me at home. He frightens me.”
    “Worse than we do?”
    “Yes.”
    “Didn’t you go to the police? The FBI?”
    “They can’t do anything without proof.”
    “Couldn’t you go ask help from your friends? Stay with someone?”
    “I don’t have many close friends.”
    Pace thought, She’s as nutty as any of us.
    “And did you allow Cassandra and me to...associate?”
    “You were close friends. You were both notably calmer in each other’s presence. You were better off together than apart.”
    He looked out the window at the prostitutes below. In his depths, somebody opened up a doctor’s bag and pulled out scalpels and instruments and a heavy leather apron. Pace wondered if he should run. Steal the Chevy and drive through the tunnel and find himself a fish cannery. Stay the course, start slapping back the meds. Forget this little detour ever happened.
    “I need sleep.”
    “It’s only three in the afternoon.”
    He could sense a burgeoning realm of misery building within him, a growing understanding. Within it, he thought, would be design and purpose. Further blood, maybe redemption, perhaps even the reclamation of Jane.
    There were two bedrooms in the apartment, a small one with a door and large one without. He knew the three of them would be sharing the mattresses on the floor of doorless room, afraid to be closed in or spend the night too far away from one another.
    He walked to the other bedroom. They’d left it for him. There was an old box spring and mattress, but the sheets looked clean. Maybe they planned on giving him Maureen Brandt too, as a sacrifice. They were scared and wanted to appease him.
     

five
     
    When he awoke, the orange lace of dusk slipped in through a barred window. They were still shouting in Spanish on the street.
    Atop the sheet kneeled the blue woman.
    Her gills eased open as she breathed, arching above him on the bed, watching him. As she shifted her chain mail dress jangled, crusted with jewels, seashells, and coral. She drew fiery sigils and spells in the air. Arcane symbols and covenants in a sea language that had been chiseled into rock at the bottom of the deepest trenches and abysses of the ocean.
    Her black and lidless eyes, like a shark’s, somehow retained a great humanity. He sensed her sorrow.
    Princess Eirrin, ten thousand-year-old sorceress and heir to the Atlantean throne, one of Pia’s alternates.
    “You awaken to this world once more,” she said in a voice strong enough to be heard even under the frothing waves of the Aegean. She used to show him treasures taken from centuries-old galleon shipwrecks: gems, Roman coins, doubloons, riches from the fallen empires which she used to decorate her throne floor.
    Pace said, “Hello Princess, it’s been a while.”
    Beside her sat a panting pug which she stroked with one webbed hand. The dog cocked his head at Pace, climbed up the blankets, and laid his chin on Pace’s forearm. This was Crumble, one of Hayden’s personalities.
    Eirrin undid Pace’s shirt and pressed her palm against his chest: it was cool, a bit clammy, soft and meaty like dolphin skin. She moved her nails against the burn scars, tracing their ridges and contours.
    “You remind me of another human